


Take Note

by Surrealities



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Spoilers - No Mercy Route, Spoilers - Pacifist Route
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-03
Updated: 2016-06-10
Packaged: 2018-05-17 23:11:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5888845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Surrealities/pseuds/Surrealities
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An intruder stumbles into a dead girl's cyclical purgatory. Together, these two scientific minds may be able to do what neither could apart.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Wax Museum

She passed each monster, all of them frozen like exhibits in a wax museum, with a mutter, never looking up from her notebook. Ink covered every inch of paper, two cramped lines between each divide, sentences scribbled in boxes and spirals in the margins, arrows connecting sentence halves divided by the limitations of space and linear thought. Nestled in what empty bits remained were small sketches, anatomical studies of creatures large and small. Some came in sensible shapes, limbs and sensory organs arranged in sequences treated as biological law aboveground. Some could have passed as works of surrealist art--a cat head whose mobility relied on a mix of hovering and hopping, or a boy whose body resembled a human’s but whose head was a diamond. Not just diamond-shaped, but a literal diamond. He had no face, but he had spoken, she remembered. His words were a memory long discarded, but she remembered the fascination with which she’d listened, and the surreality of seeing her own face in the facets of biology and geology’s illegitimate child. 

Both types surrounded her now. This was New Home, a city where monsters packed tight as sardines in a tin can. A daunting place for a lone human when the monsters walked and writhed and crawled and hopped around her in lively crowds, but with the creatures still and silent, it posed no more danger than your average gallery. 

Each monster she passed drew new mutterings out of her. They emerged in starts and stops, sentences halting midway through only to transition, with no pause larger than the space between words, into something entirely unrelated. She spoke a jumbled mess of thoughts that made no sense if taken chronologically but, with a little pattern recognition, could be taken apart and pieced back together into a sort of biological encyclopaedia. 

“A small monster resembling a surface frog in appearance--” she said as she drifted past a froggit stuck at the start of a leap, its legs bunching with kinetic energy that would never be released. “--this creature flees all social interaction, both kind and cruel.” This second half of the sentence had nothing to do with the froggit at all. It was the finale to an entry on the whimsun species started days ago in the musty ruins of Home.

A group of monsters stuck in silent conversation drew out new thoughts. “--seems compelled to complete the impossible task of cleaning--obsessed with strength to a degree that repulses other monsters, most notably the Tem and--the entire world. Could there be some evolutionary purpose to--speaks no language, at least not one that makes etymological sense, but other monsters understand it nonetheless.” 

She trailed away with this final observation on the communicative capabilities of the moldsmal. That group of monsters--a woshua, half turtle, half bathtub, all obsessive drive to clean everything from dusty shelves to the soil itself; an aaron, a mercreature with the tail of a fish, the abs of a burly man, and the head of a horse; woshua again; and the wriggling, speechless Moldsmal--was the last before the golden corridor.

At the door, she stopped. She turned to the last page of her notebook. One of her sketches took up most of this page. It depicted a white beast with ears that flopped down to his shoulders and horns that added at least a foot to his height. His blonde hair and impressive beard somehow conveyed his royalty, even without the help of the crown on his head and the shell of gleaming armor encasing his body. He stood as tall as one of her and half again--impressive, as she was nearly six feet tall, a gangly girl whose awkward proportions had harmed her dating prospects for about nine years of twenty-one-year-old life. 

No. She was older than twenty-one now, wasn’t she? This coherent thought, the first in perhaps three cycles, startled her. She tried to quash it, but it grew beyond her reach, rooting itself in the crevices of her mind, growing branches on which other thoughts soon bloomed. 

It had been dozens of years, she remembered. Dozens of years and hundreds of cycles, miles upon miles traveled along the same path. First the ruins, with all their lost and crumbling majesty. Next, the snow, the trees, and a clearing surrounded by three ramshackle houses. Their owners, two large families of rabbits and a flock of birds whose facial feathers resembled snowflakes, called the place Snowdin Town, but it had a ways to go before earning its name. Beyond the snow were the caverns of Waterfall, dark and wet and filled with monsters who stared ever upward, past the crystals embedded in the ceiling to an imagined skyscape twinkling with real stars. The last leg of her journey before New Home saw her sweating through Hotland, where lava lapped against natural walkways so hot they threatened to melt the rubber soles of her shoes to the ground. 

Ruins. Snowdin. Waterfall. Hotland. New Home. Ruins. Snowdin. Waterfall. Hotland. New Home. She fell. She walked. She died. She fell. She walked. She died. At first, it hadn’t been so bad. She could linger in populated places, take solace in the friends she’d made, and forget, for a time, what lay at the end of the path. But as the cycles continued, the denizens began to break down like animatronics in a tunnel ride, their words slurring into meaningless babble, their movements jerking into the uncanny valley, and their eyes and expressions hollowing, one emotion at a time.

One day, she had pushed herself up and out of the flower bed that always broke her fall to find Toriel standing over her with hands clasped rather than outstretched to help her stand. 

The girl nudged the Ruins’ caretaker to no effect, not even the slightest give of muscle or skin. Toriel looked like the work of a talented taxidermist, lifelike in both form and pose but empty of all that had kept her alive. 

Throughout that and all subsequent cycles, only one monster showed any signs of life: her towering executioner, King Asgore Dreemur. 

Only his speech never faltered. Only his movements remained fluid. “Human . . .” he would say, every time she approached through that final door. “Goodbye.” 

His blood red trident flashed toward her, through her, piercing skin, muscle, and bone. It speared her soul, ripped it out through her chest, and her body fell to the ground, empty, broken, and bleeding. 

After that, darkness, and after the darkness, the Ruins. She always woke up in midair above the golden flower patch where Toriel stood a rigor mortis sentry. 

The girl hated to remember the truth of her situation. It made her legs shake. Her throat hurt. Her breath came out in gasps. She stood in front of the corridor’s door, watching droplets of sweat roll off of her nose and onto Asgore's picture, warping the paper, but not the ink. 

She had tried to go back, once, but all ways out of New Home were locked, barred, or barricaded. Her options were to remain forever in one of the rooms leading up to Asgore or continue onward in the hopes that when Asgore’s trident ripped into her, she would finally die for good. 

To catch her breath, she leaned against the door, pressing her forehead into the cool wood. She gave the door her entire weight, expecting it to support her until she felt ready to move on again.

When it swung open, dropping her face-first onto the floor and coming back to slam into her head, she suddenly remembered: “Oh right, that’s a swinging door.”

She lay there for a minute before giving a half-hearted “Ow,” and then she was laughing like she hadn’t in--years?--yes, it was probably years. “Ahaha--ow--hahaha--I can’t--” she sputtered out, voice muffled by the floor. “I can’t--hehehe--believe--ahahaha--what was that--hee--a pratfall? Right here? Right now? Pfft.” 

She giggled so loud she almost didn’t hear the footsteps approaching down the corridor, and even then she didn’t stop. It figured that after all this time, after so many identical cycles, the thing that would force the King off-script would be her tripping through a door. She tried to recall her lines as the footsteps drew closer. “Haha--boss monster--heh--the male’s horns are much larger than the female’s--hah--unparalleled magical power--pff--affinity for fire magic.” 

The source of the footsteps had stopped not a foot away from her. “--gentle until provoked--hah, there’s a funny joke.” She looked up, eyes wide, a painful grin contorting her face into an expression not even the most dedicated taxidermist could preserve. 

“Huh,” the monster standing over her said. “You’re not the human I been waiting for.” 

He was not Asgore. He was no one she had ever met. 

He wasn’t possible, had to be a sign that her world was breaking down even further. She started to ask who he was, but found it safer to fall back into habit. Treat him like the wax statue he is, she reminded herself. “ Skeleton,” she started. “Resembling a human corpse, this creature is testament to monsters’ biological impossibility. No muscle, but they still move. No stomach, but they still eat. They speak without vocal cords, they feel without skin, they see without eyes. They can contort certain parts of their body--the skull, in particular--as if they were made of flesh, but even when moving, those parts remain stiff to the touch. They--” 

“Woah, hey there, no need to tell me all that. I’m pretty much an expert in all things skeletal.” He winked. She felt the urge to touch his eyelid, to further test the malleability of skeleton monsters’ bones. “Biological impossibility, though, that’s a new one. Pretty fancy title. I’ll have to add that to my resume.” 

He offered her a hand and a smile even wider than her own.


	2. Tastes Like Ketchup

The skeleton managed to haul her to her feet despite their size disparity. Looking down at him, her fingers itched to put pen to paper, scratch out a sketch, and make note of the physiological differences between him and the skeleton who’d inspired the entry in the first place. 

Her new friend stood somewhere in the upper bounds of four feet. Between four-foot-nine and four-foot-eleven, she guessed. He was oddly round for someone made entirely of bone. Was it magic, she wondered, or just the effect of his oversized hoodie? On closer inspection, she noticed that the shirt under the hoodie didn’t cling to his ribs like it should, nor did his gym shorts to his hip bones. Magic, then. 

Though his skull’s basic features bore a superficial resemblance to humanity’s, their shape, size, and placement were nothing like a human’s. His eyes were too wide, too circular, and altogether too expressive. Their quirk and furrow more than made up for his grin, which never so much as twitched as they surveyed each other. Block his eyes, and the grin might seem jocular. Block the grin, and his eyes spoke exhaustion. He had bags under them, somehow. She wanted to touch those, too. 

She was in the middle of cataloguing his nose hole, much too small to ever belong to an adult human, when he spoke up. “Look, kid, much as I’d love to spend time getting to know you, we gotta get you out of here.”

She looked above him, to the door at the other end of the hallway. “No, not there. Believe me, you don’t wanna go there,” he said. 

She did not. 

“Something’s coming this way,” he said. “Something bad. Something that isn’t gonna show us mercy if it finds us.” His pupils, points of light like fireflies in the darkness of his empty sockets, flicked to her notebook, then to the pen clasped in her ink-stained hand. “No offense, but you don’t look like a fighter.” 

“Monsters will almost always repay kindness with kindness,” she recited from a passage near the middle of her notebook. “The magic they throw has no malice behind it. Even those who fight for real can be talked down and befriended.” 

“Yeah, that sounds about right. Unfortunately, the thing coming this way isn’t a monster.”

She got what he was implying, but had no entries to relay that. Instead, she used a passage from a book she’d read while waiting out a sudden but short-lived blizzard with her friend Berry, the matriarch of one of Snowdin’s rabbit families. “Love, hope, compassion . . . This is what people say monster SOULs are made of. But the absolute nature of ‘SOUL’ is unknown. After all, humans have proven their SOULs don’t need these things to exist.” 

He chuckled. “Hope you don’t think too badly of us after reading something like that,” he said. 

Already she preferred this automaton to Asgore. His voice, like a cartoon buffoon’s, deep and haunted by the ghost of laughs past, soothed her. He knew gravity, was well-acquainted with melancholy and hopelessness. He didn’t try to convince her that everything was normal. He didn’t tell lies just to keep her spirits high. They could have been great friends, she thought, if only he were real. 

“C’mon. We’ve gotta get going. My friend Alphys took a bunch of evacuees to her lab. Should be safe. The other human’s already passed them by.” 

He tugged at her sleeve, and she let him take her hand in his again. “I know a shortcut,” he said. 

He led her out of the corridor, back the way she came. Outside, she blinked the glow of New Home’s artificial lighting away, and when they’d cleared, she saw something that made her jerk back toward the doorway they’d just left. The skeleton felt it and stopped to look over his shoulder, a question writ in the impossible lift of the bone just above his eye sockets. 

She struggled to find the words to explain. “New Home is the overcrowded capital of the Underground. Monsters throng its streets at all times of the day. Moving through it can be like trying to push through a solid wall of molasses.” 

The bridge was empty. It had never been empty before. Not when she was alive, not in all the time that she’d spent dead. 

“Weren’t you just here? They all evacuated.” 

“ . . . the species of New Home are much more varied than those in previous environments. In my short time here, I’ve seen froggits, snowdrakes, tem, pyropes, and hundreds of species I have no name for.” 

“Hit your head pretty hard, huh?”

She had no entry to use as a suitable response. “Don’t worry. Bound to be someone with healing magic down there,” he said.

She expected him to lead her across the bridge. Instead, he swiveled toward the elevator off to their right. With his free hand, he punched a sequence of numbers into the keypad, and the door slid open. “After you,” he said, bowing her inside. 

When the door had shut behind him, the elevator hummed to life, though neither of them had touched a button. A slight drop in her stomach meant they were descending, and then, just as quickly as it had begun, the humming stopped. The lights flickered off, leaving the girl and her would-be rescuer mired in one of her worst nightmares: a powerless, unmoving elevator stuck between floors. Her breathing hitched. Her brain exploded with every elevator-related death she could imagine. Would it be worse if the wires snapped and the carriage plummeted down and down until the inevitable crunch, or if the elevator stayed locked between floors and the two of them died of starvation? She closed her eyes to try and trick herself into believing the darkness was a logical result of her own actions. 

“Don’t worry, it always does this,” the skeleton said. “Just give it a sec.” 

After approximately ten “secs,” light spilled through her eyelids. The humming resumed. She relished the return of descent to her stomach. She opened her eyes to see the skeleton leaning with one hand against the other wall of the elevator. His eyelids drooped, and a few drops of sweat shone on his forehead. She felt tired just looking at him. More than that, though, she wanted to lean in and check his skull for pores.

“Almost there,” he said. He sounded out of breath, though she saw no reason he should bother breathing.

The ding of the elevator's arrival seemed to revive him somewhat. He gave her an “after you” bow, and she took the lead. 

Outside the elevator was a hallway, and beyond that hallway, a place she knew well. How could she not after so much time spent trailing after the Royal Scientist, a flood of questions pouring from her all the while. Some were answered, some were not. She didn't begrudge him the unanswered ones, though she often tried to rephrase them later on to see if she could trick him into giving away more than he wanted. Sneaky, yes, but she shelved her guilt in the name of science.

This was the lab’s “foyer,” the central room from which every other part of the lab branched. Things were different, though. This place seemed constructed from someone else's memories. Once it had looked like a doctor's office, all bright lights, floral decorations, and landscape paintings tastefully arranged on the walls. 

Now sterility seeped from every corner. It emanated from the dim lights above, from the single furnishing, a vending machine that served only potato chisps, and from the plastic potted plants sitting on either side of the entrance. The room's normal denizens, two assistants stuck in conversational stasis, were nowhere to be found.

It was as though they’d walked onto the set of a horror movie. Any moment, the missing assistants might lurch out of the hallways to the left and right of the room, alive again in all the wrong ways. The skeleton’s hand in hers, sensory illusion though it may be, was the only thing keeping her from dashing inside the elevator and riding back to New Home, where at least the atmosphere could pass as nice. 

“They’ll be deeper in,” the skeleton said. He pointed to the door down the right hallway. “This way.” 

She knew that door led to the chem lab, or so it had a few hours ago, when she'd stopped in to fetch the royal scientist's key into the locked up Core. Now, with its identical beds arranged in rows, it seemed like a displaced orphanage bedroom.

They hurried through a few hallways, empty but for a series of monitors that flickered on as they passed, and one room that made her stop and gawk. A machine hung from the ceiling over a pit so deep she couldn’t see its bottom. The machine looked like an animal skull (a goat’s, perhaps) with a thick metal circulatory system. Her companion urged her on before she could assess its purpose. “You can spend all the time you want with ol’ D.T. here when it’s safe,” he said. 

What could D.T. stand for? She ran through terms in her head as they exited the room. Had the Royal Scientist ever mentioned D.T. during one of their talks? 

They halted in the next room. Fans chilled the air inside, and a row of refrigerators sat along the wall. The skeleton approached one of these and opened its freezer. Inside, a panel of numbered keys were set in a shallow depression. On tiptoes, he could just barely reach them. She looked away as he tapped the code in. It was only polite. 

A beep sounded from the panel, and the door of the next refrigerator over swung open. Beyond this door was another door, this one protected by a card reader. The skeleton drew an ID card out of his hoodie pocket and swiped it through. 

She caught part of the name on the ID before the skeleton could thrust it back inside his hoodie. “Sam?” she guessed from the two letters she’d seen. 

“Huh?” He glanced down at the ID. “Oh, guess we never introduced ourselves.” He gave her a little two finger salute and said, “Sans. Sans No-Last-Name-Given. You?” 

When he asked, static filled her head with a buzzing she had trouble thinking through. She had not been able to hear her name over it since the start of the cycles. 

She gave him the pseudonym she’d decided on the first time the false Toriel had asked. “Violet,” she said. 

“Nice to meetcha, Violet.” 

She nodded. Her well of original words had run dry.

The refrigerator let out into a stairwell. As they walked, down and down, toward a sub-level she had never visited in life or death, Violet ruminated on Sans’ ID card. She recognized the card’s layout. She’d snagged identical cards from each assistant’s pocket after they stopped moving. She’d searched every pocket in the Underground, hoping for something more interesting than pocket lint and loose change. The cards proved less useful than she’d hoped, as every door she used them on opened into a black space she dared not step into. This was how she had learned that places existing beyond the bounds of her own memories were off-limits to her. This world could not create them because she did not know them.

She ended up using the cards for a more frivolous purpose. The cards listed each lab assistant’s name, age, and species. One cycle, bored and wanting an excuse to avoid New Home, she took this information and wove a fictional web of alliances, rivalries, and relationships from it. With her notebooks devoid of writing space, she scrawled the saga onto printer paper and attached each chapter to a clipboard. She stacked these in the chem lab, labeled with important events and plot twists to help her keep track of them for future chapters. 

She came back after the next reset to find them gone. The saga ended there.

If Sans had an ID card, he was probably an assistant she’d seen but never met. For some reason, Violet’s subconscious had called him up and made him the center of an elaborate roleplaying scenario. Perhaps it had done so to rescue her from her own dwindling sanity. She had no hard evidence, but it made sense. It was the only thing that made sense. 

As they approached the bottom of the stairwell, they heard a hissed “Shh” and an inaudible whisper from a door that had just come into view. 

Sans held out a hand to stop Violet. “Yo, don’t worry,” he called. “It’s me.”

The door below creaked open, and a yellow, reptilian head peeked through. “Sans?” she choked out in a voice made rusty by the tears rolling in a steady stream from her bespectacled eyes. “S-Sans?”

He waved.

“Oh. Oh my God. You’re okay.” She launched herself up the stairs two at a time and, on reaching Sans, enveloped him in a hug. At the sight, Violet felt the symptoms of some emotion she couldn’t identify, a pain in her back and a tightening of the chest that made it hard to breathe. The feeling subsided when the lizard let go and began to babble. “I t-thought--I mean, I know y-you’re talented, but even Un . . . but even Undyne . . .” She stopped for a second to brush away the tears gathering on her cheeks. “B-but, it’s okay. You’re here! I don’t know what I would’ve done if you--if you had--if . . .” 

“Sorry to get your hopes up, Alphys,” Sans said. Alphys’ tail upraised tail sunk to the floor. “The fight’s not over yet. Hasn’t even started.” 

“Y-you haven’t . . .” 

“Not yet,” he said. 

“T-then don’t! Don’t go! Stay here with us. King Asgore will,” she swallowed, “King Asgore will take care of it. He has the human souls.”

Sans leaned in close to her and, with a glance at the door below, whispered, “You and I both know Asgore will never absorb those souls.” 

“He has to,” she said. 

“What he has to do and what he’s going to do are two completely different things,” Sans said. “I already checked up on him, just in case. You know what he’s doing? He’s sitting in the garden, talking to his flowers, no souls in sight.” 

“H-how could he . . . ?” 

“Don’t think too badly of him,” Sans said. “He’s already got enough sins crawling on his back. He absorbs those souls, he’s gonna have ‘em crawling around under his skin, too.” 

Alphys’ shoulders sagged. She looked back at the door, her eyes swimming with thoughts Violet could never imagine. 

“I just came back to drop her off,” Sans said. Alphys turned back to them. She glanced at Violet, who had begun to mumble to herself.

“Saurian. One of the most varied monster species, comprising everything from humanoid lizards to shrunken t-rexes. All possess natural weapons--horns, spikes, claws, teeth--but prefer to use magic for self-defense.” She took in Alphys’ blunted frills, tiny claws, and buck-toothed frown. “Almost all,” she revised. 

“Is she okay?” Alphys asked. 

“Hit her head,” Sans said. “Was hoping you could find her a healer. 

“Of c-course!” 

She smiled at Violet, who wondered why. According to Sans’ story, a human was tearing a dusty swathe through the Underground, a swathe so big as to cause a full evacuation. Why would either of them trust her? 

“Hope to see you both again,” Sans said. 

They aren’t real, Violet reminded herself. 

Alphys started down the stairs. “I hope so, too.” 

They aren’t real. 

Still, when she looked over her shoulder to see that Sans had gone, a prick of regret needled her heart. Beside her, Alphys seized up. The life left her eyes, and her last word halted midway through. 

It had been nice, Violet thought, to listen to some other voices for a change. 

Violet ignored the room below. With Sans gone, she would no doubt find nothing but emptiness beyond. Instead, she made her way back up the stairs. She half expected to find Sans rooted to them somewhere along the way, but the only skeleton along her ascent was her own. 

When she emerged from the refrigerator, she considered riding the elevator back to New Home to see if Sans had returned to the corridor, but she didn’t want to risk finding him petrified like all the rest. She would give him time to fight whatever fight her mind had made up for him. She would wait to see if he came back. If he didn’t, she would go back to Asgore and look forward to meeting her new friend again on the next cycle through. If he did, well, she would go along with whatever her subconscious had planned for them next. 

She decided to wait outside the elevator. She wanted to hear it descend, if it ever did. 

She stood outside the door for about ten minutes, reading and rereading her skeleton entry, wishing she could add her new findings to it without the next cycle erasing them, when an unexpected pain slashed from her right shoulder to her left thigh. She staggered backwards, into the wall behind her. 

Her hand groped at her chest, where the pain still throbbed. She did not expect to feel something wet. Her hand was shaking as she looked down to see it coated in red. Blood, she thought at first, but something was off. It was cold. Its color was a little less “death” and a little more “tomato.” 

She brought the hand to her nose. The smell reminded her of french fries. She licked it.

It tasted like ketchup. 

Her knees buckled. She tried to catch herself as she fell, but the ketchup-covered hand slipped, and for the second time that day, her nose pressed against the floor. She went to push herself up, but she couldn’t. Not because she was too weak, but because her arm was leaking out of her sleeve, forming a pile of dust on the floor below. 

Fascinated, she watched herself crumble until the darkness came. 

***

She woke up on the floor between the corridor and the bridge to New Home. Her body was back. The pain was gone. She lifted herself up. Raising her head, she found herself looking at Sans, who stood further down the corridor, clutching his chest where her wound had been.


	3. Megalovania

Sans approached her. Offered his hand. He repeated everything he’d said the previous cycle, down to the letter. 

Something was different this time, though. Sans’ lines no longer held the same emotion they had before. He sounded tired. Well, tired _er_ , at least. He dragged his feet a little as they walked through the lab. His shoulders hunched, and his smile—well, it didn’t falter, didn’t seem capable of faltering, but it nonetheless seemed false. 

Alphys stuttered in all the same ways as the last cycle. There wasn’t even the slightest change in her demeanor. When Sans left, she froze again, and again, Violet trekked back to the elevator. There, she decided to experiment.  

The previous cycle, she decided, would be her control. That cycle was what happened when she waited by the elevator. Until now, she had recreated the cycle to the best of her ability, even attempting to mimic her movements and her only vaguely varying inflection. Now came the moment where control and variable split. Violet decided to go back to the corridor rather than wait at the elevator. 

She hypothesized that Sans had something to do with the unusual circumstances of her last death, but she couldn’t imagine what. The only way to find out—at least, the only way she could see at this juncture—was to observe what he’d done when he’d left her side. At the elevator, she punched in the code she’d seen Sans enter, and stepped inside. 

The elevator’s lights flickered off again on the way up. This time she didn’t have Sans’ hand, so she clung to his words instead. “Don’t worry. It always does this,” she said, closing her eyes. Her hand groped in the darkness until it found the metal railing along the side of the car. “Just give it a sec.” 

The secs passed, and, just as before, the elevator’s power shuddered back on. She opened her eyes when the elevator’s ding signaled the end of its journey. The door slid open, and New Home’s false sun flooded inside to dispel the remnants of the laboratory’s melancholic miasma. 

She breathed deeply as she stepped through the door. It was a beautiful day outside. Birds were singing, flowers were blooming. On days like these, she wanted nothing more than a patch of grass and a good book. 

A blast, like a TV-quality laser gun but deeper, more protracted, and with an after effect like a demon’s gasp, sounded behind the corridor door, accompanied by a cracking, scraping noise she could visualize no action for. 

She longed to just stand there and take the day in, but discovery called. 

The door gave only the slightest whine as she pushed it open. She only needed enough space to peek. If she wanted accurate information, after all, she couldn’t disturb the scene before it had run its course. 

Two figures stood inside: Sans, her new favorite anomaly, on the far end of the corridor, and a human child of indiscernible race and gender nearer to Violet. Sans was saying something, but even with the corridor’s echo, Violet couldn’t make it out. The kid tensed as the skeleton spoke, and as soon as the last word left Sans’ mouth, the fight began. 

Waves of bone thrust out of the floor to both sides of the kid, who evaded as best they could, jumping left and right until Sans’ magic wore down. In the openings, the child thrust forward, knife starting toward Sans’ neck but always stopping mid air in an empty space where Sans no longer stood. 

At times, the attacks on both sides would suddenly end. Sans took those moments to say a few more words. The kid caught their breath and readied themselves for the next onslaught. Violet spent these moments pondering the child. This was the creature Sans and Alphys feared, wasn’t it? Despite their size—a few inches shorter than Sans—and despite the youth belied by their small, dust-covered hands, Violet could see why. Neither joy nor regret tilted their half-lidded eyes. Sans’ words had no visible effect. The child was nothing but a body being pulled along by the eager lunge of their knife. 

She couldn’t understand how it must feel to face such an empty malevolence. Or maybe . . . maybe she could. She had come to the conclusion, long ago, that this place operated like a dream. It created itself from building blocks her mind provided. If she were to step back and analyze this situation, keeping in mind the nonsense that a dream might  _ mean  _ something, perhaps Sans and the child were a metaphor for her own situation. Sans, her sanity, struggling against an unfeeling, unresponsive force with only one objective: his death. 

For a long time, Violet had fought as Sans did, using tricks and traps to try and derail the cycle before it could chug back around again. But each time Asgore threw her back to the Ruins, the cycle learned something. Each death patched away another glitch until her only option was to play by the cycle’s rules. 

In an early attempt at rebellion, she tried staying in one place, settling into Gerson’s house while he waited at the cavern at the end of Waterfall, ready to repeat his lines and swing his hammer in ways that had already evolved from “predictable” to “rote.” The cycle responded by locking all doors in the house except the entrance. She could deal with losing the bedroom and the washroom, but “every door” included the cabinets and fridge. This reduced her food options to a single bag of family-sized potato chisps and two of Berry’s cinnamon bunnies. The cinnamon bunnies were gone by the next morning, and the potato chisps lasted two miserable days. 

Faced with a choice between wasting away on Gerson’s lilypad-patterned carpet or continuing onward and letting Asgore end it quickly, she chose to continue. From then on, doors shut and locked behind her. Tunnels collapsed. Bridges snapped, and walkways crumbled. The riverperson vanished, and their river roiled into rapids wild enough to splatter the contents of her skull against the rocks. 

She had tried smashing a chair against one of the wooden doors. It refused to splinter. She threw rocks at windows. They clattered to the ground without leaving so much as a crack. Propping a door open only lasted as long as it was in view. The moment she looked away, a loud slam and the click of a lock settling into place heralded the disappearance of her doorstop. 

It didn’t take her long to give up trying to go back. Throwing herself against impossibilities didn’t really appeal anymore. 

No matter what she did, she was going to end up right back where she started, anyway. 

Violet stopped herself from jumping into the fight. Sans was wearing down. She could see it in his eyes, in the beads of sweat forming on his forehead. His attacks increased in ferocity, but his hope diminished each time the child’s knife struck out.

She wanted the fight to end. Not for Sans’ sake. If he lost, she would deliver herself straight to Asgore’s waiting spear. Or perhaps the child’s knife would bite into her heart. Everything would be reset, and they would both live again. No, the fight distressed her for much more selfish reasons.

Watching Sans, she started to feel . . . false. How long had it been since she’d done something so simply biological as sweat? His legs and arms shook with the effort of an endurance race he was swiftly losing. For some time, Violet had felt only the false pain delivered by the reruns of fights from her actual trip through the underground, and then, after those combatants had frozen, sapped of all will and ability to fight, only the pierce of Asgore’s spear. The pains she remembered from life—feet aching from the length of her journey, the pressing heat of Hotland, the smash of Gerson’s hammer or Berry’s shovel against her exposed soul—no longer troubled her. Even Asgore’s spear only pricked as bad as a bee sting.

When pain was dull and death was fleeting, it made it kind of hard to give it her all.

Or maybe that was just a poor excuse for giving up on her attempts to break the cycle. Hell if she knew.

Violet bit her finger to remind herself that she was real. It hurt, but she couldn’t be sure it wasn’t a trick of the mind. Maybe it only hurt because she expected it to. She bit down harder, to see if the pain would intensify, until she tasted the hot, metallic tinge of blood. She could still bleed. At least she had that over Sans. The thought comforted her for the two seconds it took for her to notice a small stream of blood running from Sans’ knuckle to his fingertip.

Violet did something very stupid. She regretted it even as it was happening. She yelped. 

The child stopped mid-swing. Sans’ firefly eyes flicked to the door. Violet shrank back, letting the door swing shut. 

She thought about fleeing the scene, but, of course, the bridge she’d crossed to get to the corridor in the first place had crumbled behind her, leaving her with only a few steps’ worth of space to retreat. As she wondered what could be done, the sounds beyond the door drew closer. Running footsteps. The crunch of Sans’ bones bursting through the floor. The made-for-TV sci-fi movie blast of Sans’ lasers. 

The door slammed open. The child stood framed in the doorway, their knife only a lunge away from landing in her heart.  


Well, she thought, as she stared down the length of the child’s brandished weapon, at least it was a new way to die. 

Suddenly, Violet’s heart grew heavy. Literally. It felt like a stone weighing her down. She looked at her chest just in time to see her soul turn blue. Behind the child, she saw Sans’ arm thrust into the air. With a scream, she flew into the air, out of the knife's reach. She screamed, and the child skidded to a halt beneath her. Sans’ arm twitched to the side, and she was dragged over the child’s head and through the door to the corridor. She landed in a pile next to Sans with an “oof!” that Sans echoed. He staggered backward, clutching his stomach like he was the one who’d just taken a trip on the blue soul express. 

“Shit,” he wheezed. He looked down at Violet. “Are you okay?” 

She scrambled to her feet. “Okay,” she confirmed. 

She hadn’t wanted to get involved in the fight, but it seemed she had no choice. She brandished the only weapon she had: her notebook. 

“You know, when they say ‘the pen is mightier than the sword,’ I don’t think that’s what they mean,” Sans said. 

She ignored him. The notebook had already proven itself. Berry, Gerson . . . even the Royal Scientist had fallen to its flapping pages. 

The child turned to face them. Blue magic flared in Sans’ eye. Violet steeled herself to attack. 

Violet had never fought with another person by her side. It had always been just her. Even her new friends had never offered their strength. It felt almost like cheating, having someone else to draw an enemy’s fire. When the child leapt at Sans, she closed in, swinging her notebook straight at their exposed soul. It made contact. The child cried out, but did not fall. They turned their attention to Violet. 

Violet hadn’t had to dodge in a long time. She was afraid she’d be too rusty to manage. But now that her eyes were trained on the knife, she realized just how simple the child’s attacks were. They were nothing like the rhythmic barrage of a monster’s magic. She easily avoided an oncoming swipe. As she danced away, Sans attacked. Bones flew at the child. Lasers criss-crossed through the air. The child had no chance to dodge. The looked up just in time to see one of the skull-like blasters open its jaws wide. 

In the midst of the ensuing blast, Violet saw the child’s soul crack into pieces. When the laser’s light had faded, nothing of the child remained save for their fallen knife and a golden locket coiled on the floor. 

“Shit,” Sans said again. “Shit.” He sank to his knees. “Wow.” He looked at Violet. “I don’t know about you, but I’d say that was one ‘for the books.’” When Violet didn’t respond, he waved a hand at her notebook. 

A joke. Oh. 

She laughed. It wasn’t really funny, but she laughed. He laughed too. The two of them sat there for a minute, cracking up over Sans’ stupid joke. “Man, you think that one was funny?” Sans said, brushing a tear out of his eye. “Wait ‘til you see what comes next.”

Violet waited, giggling, but Sans only chuckled to himself. “Wait for it . . .” 

Like a TV losing power, the world flickered out. 


End file.
